What Baboons Can Tell Us About Aging and Singles Dances

But first, please check out The Byronic Man. Joel, the author, took time from his busy schedule of hilarity to feature Life in the Boomer Lane in his “20 Questions” series. If you like her answers to his questions, let her know. If not, she’ll change them for you.

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In the countries with the longest life expectancies, average life span has grown over the past two centuries at the astonishing rate of about 2.5 years per decade, three months per year, or six hours per day, according to demographer James Vaupel of Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

Don’t get excited just yet. Actual people have not added six more hours per day and are generally pissed off that newborn babies, who have no responsibilities at all, will have longer days than everyone else.

“I have a lot of stuff to do all the time,” said a spokesperson for the Association of People Who Are Not Babies. “Babies do nothing. They lay around all day and people say how cute they are. If you post a photo of a baby on Facebook, there will be approximately 500 comments of ‘Oh my God, my heart just stopped. That is the most beautiful baby on the planet!’ Babies just take, take, take. So why are their days longer than mine?

Aside from babies hogging all the extra time that should go to older people, what else can we learn about aging?

Centenarians, those living to age 100, are on the rise (metaphorically speaking.) Rapidly (again, metaphorically speaking). As a group, centenarians tend to be extreme examples of healthy aging. Researchers are studying populations in Japan, Denmark, and Hawaii that have unusually large shares of centenarians to understand what sets them apart.

Most of these ” ‘exceptional survivors’ delay major clinical diseases and disability,” according to Dr. Bradley Willcox, a University of Hawaii gerontologist. One possibility that has been suggested is that as people age, they have less of a grasp of technology. Younger people all have smart phones and electronic schedules. Older people don’t and so bumble through life with no specific timetable for either getting anywhere or when is the appropriate age for disease and/or disability. One morning, they wake up and discover they have no teeth and are 100 years old.

A real conundrum is that compared with women, men are physically stronger, have fewer disabilities, and are much more likely to tell interviewers that they are in good health. When researchers analyzed 55,000 prehistoric human skeletons dating back as many as 11,000 years from sites in Scandinavia, they saw, predictably, that men lived longer than women.

Yet, in late Middle Ages (as opposed to late middle age), a shift occurred. Men started to have higher mortality than women at all adult ages. This discrepancy between health and survival—known as the male-female health-survival paradox—has long puzzled demographers and other researchers, and cannot be attributed solely to men being forced to wear tights and silly hoods.

Baboons can tell us a lot about aging, as long as we do not require them to speak. As male baboons age, testosterone declines and they spend more time alone. This concept may explain human behavior as well. A recent survey of people at singles dances for ages 35 and up, revealed two things:

1. everyone there was over the age of 50

2. women who attended these dances spent the evening dancing and socializing, while men who said they attended these dances, in reality never left their Barcaloungers. So, at the end of the evening, the women were fit and socialized, while the men had exercised only the finger that controlled the remote and had socialized only with the pizza delivery guy.

In sum, we have learned three things: Babies make out like bandits in this whole aging thing, except real bandits are usually toilet trained and can feed themselves. Men are the weaker sex. Older single female baboons are probably kvetching about the same things as older single female humans.

All I can say is that when I hit 50 (and it hit me back) I was totally horrified to hear that I had about an 80% chance of living to 100. Kind of like when I heard that Hindus believe we have to go through 88 million reincarnations before we can come back again as HUMANS. Seriously? This vale of tears is our big reward — and we have to stay in it for a CENTURY?
I need to check in with the baboons about this.

Listen, just think about this, if you really want to go crazy: Quantum physicists tell us that all times is occuring all the time. Linear time is something we made up, because that’s what our brains can understand. So in reality, you are infinite. And I will always be short and have curly hair. There is something not right about that.

I think I once waited on some baboons who could talk. Their language skills were primitive. And they also wore overalls and John Deere hats. I find it hard to believe we could learn anything from such creatures.

Still a lot of undone research on what we can learn about human behavior from animal behavior esp apes and monkeys socialization and learned/instinct. I hear Obama and Romney are both seeking some kind of amendment so they can register babies to vote.

I think it’s fascinating. I used to think the same thing. Except some/a lot of those figures have to be because of high mortality in childbirth. I’ll bet that the women who survived lived as long as the men.

I could write forever about that. I grew up in an observant home. But from the time I was little, the idea of religion didn’t click with me. At some point, I realized that no religion could be right, because that would make all the others wrong. And it was all because people made everything up. And then, after they made it up, they argued about it and changed it and kept making it crazier and crazier. And it just went on and on. And it makes my head explode to think about it, so I just try to ignore it. And none of that negates that I know the belief system I was raised with and I applaud anyone who believes in whatever they believe in if it makes them more loving and caring toward others. A good friend of mine just said a couple days ago, “I was raised Catholic. Because of that I really do believe Jesus was the son of God, born of a virgin, crucified, and he rose on the third day. And if that’s not the craziest thing ever, I don’t know what is. So because of that, I don’t think anything anyone believes is crazier than anything else.” There. I just obliterated my succinct answer. Amen.

Amen. Completely agree. I think it’s great if a person is religious or if they’re not (I personally do believe in a higher power) and I’ve read the Bible several times when I was younger and just eventually formed my own personal spiritual beliefs along the way. We all have our own source of strength and just need to explore that however we see fit (with no one else forcing their beliefs onto us in the process…)

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